A Reaction to Religion
Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

by Pascal Boyer,

and a Reflection on the Subtle Relationship between

Spiritual Experience, Ritual and Belief

Ben Goertzel

May 22, 2002

I
just finished Pascal Boyer’s book.I
found it to be both extremely interesting and extremely frustrating.It says so many fascinating things about
its subject matter, and yet manages to almost entirely miss the point.

In
this way it is similar to the book from which its title was likely inspired,
Daniel Dennett’s popular Consciousness
Explained.

Dennett’s
ambitiously-named book gives a lot of nice ideas about the neural underpinnings
of conscious experience, and the various cognitive phenomena with which it is
associated.But it completely avoids
what some other philosophers call the “hard problem” of consciousness – i.e.
how does all this neuropsychology and cognitive science relate to the
subjective experience of consciousness, of being aware and being there.

Similarly,
Boyer’s book gives a lot of interesting, insightful ideas regarding the roots
of various beliefs and behaviors associated with the world’s religions.He asks questions that few bother with, such
as

·Out
of the set of all possible counterintuitive and rationally peculiar beliefs
conceivable by the human mind, why are some such beliefs very common across
world religions, whereas others are rare?

·Out
of all the apparently-rationally-useless group behaviors easily executable by
human groups, why are some such behaviors commonly parts of religious rituals
whereas others are not?

·How
do religious beliefs and behaviors connect with the evolutionarily-derived
cognitive biases of the human brain?

And
for these questions, he provides intriguing, usually convincing answers.

But,
just as Dennett avoids the hard problem of consciousness, Boyer avoids the hard
problem of religion, which I would define as the relationship between spiritual
experience and the various beliefs and behaviors associated with world
religions.Indeed, in the whole
book he does not mention spiritual experience at all.In a few places, he just barely intimates that it exists, for
instance observing that even though marriage and initiation rites and other
rituals are essentially “socially symbolic” in nature, nevertheless they make
the participants feel different in a subjective and hard to articulate
way.But all in all, there are only a
few sentences in the whole book devoted to religious experience even in a broad
sense, and this seems to be to be a very egregious omission.Even Dennett does not give experience quite
such short shrift!

The
back cover of the paperback edition of the book contains a quote from Steven
Pinker, which calls the book “The most important treatment of the psychological
bases of religious belief … since William James.”While Boyer’s book is a good one, I doubt very much this
assessment will hold up over time.The irony
of this quotation, however, is that Religion
Explained is the polar opposite of James’The Varieties of Religious
Experience.For James, religion
was centrally about what religious people felt and experienced, whereas for
Boyer it is primarily about what religious beliefs they hold and what
religiously-related social and ritual behaviors they engage in.

Of
course, religion does have an aspect of “routine adherence to belief and
ritual,” apart from its spiritual-experience aspect.And, as Boyer points out, religion is by no means unique in this
regard.Much of human life consists of
routine, unthinking, non-intensely-felt adherence to belief and ritual.Look at the rituals associated with dating
in modern Western society, for instance.Or look at the naïve beliefs many Americans have about the rest of the
world, in spite of the ready availability of information that would enrich
their perspectives.Any careful
observer of their own society could cite hundreds of examples.

However,
religion also has a different aspect, an experiential aspect, which has to do
with spiritually aware states of consciousness.These states of consciousness are associated with religious
activities and beliefs in a variety of ways, some obvious and some subtle.Whatever one thinks about the ultimate
nature of these states of consciousness, there is no question that they exist, in the same sense that subjective
states of mind like “love”, “rage” and “madness” exist.A huge amount of knowledge exists about
these states of consciousness, which Boyer complete ignores.Allan Combs’ book Radiance of Being is an excellent survey and systematization of the
range of knowledge about spiritual states of awareness, incorporating the
modern psychological perspective and the insights achieved by various
pre-scientific cultures.

Some
spiritual experiences are huge and profound – ecstatic oceanic feelings,
flashes or long stretches of enlightenment, sensations of total communion with
God, with one or another spirit or deity, with other humans or animals, with
the cosmos as a whole.Others are more
mundane, such as the feeling of communion and comfort that a devout Christian
feels while praying before bed each night, or the strange feeling some people
get at funerals, sensing somehow the soul of the deceased passing on.All in all, it seems very clear to me that
religion would not have evolved, nor would have it survived as long as it did,
if not for the depth and breadth of spiritual experience.Any explanation of religion that ignores
this component is, at best, severely incomplete – and at worst, missing the
point entirely.

Gregory
Bateson, in the posthumously published book Angels
Fear, gave the best analysis I have seen of the connection between
seemingly senseless religious rituals and beliefs and spiritual
experience.The core of his analysis
was a concept that Boyer does not seriously discuss at all: the sacred.What makes something sacred, according to
Bateson, is that one is not supposed to
analyze it or try to understand it.Why
not?A simplistic
evolutionary-rationalist answer would be: “Because the thing in question is
nonsense, and whomever tries to analyze or understand it will realize that it’s
nonsense.So the only nonsense-heavy
belief systems that have survived, are those that come along with the belief
that the nonsense in the belief system should not be analyzed.”I think there is definitely some truth to
this perspective -- but as Bateson points out, it is incomplete.Another key point is that as a whole, the set of beliefs and
behaviors constituting a certain religion, tend to cause the members of the
religion to have certain subjective experiences.The slightly subtle point here is that, in the context of the
human psyche, it is quite possible for a set of “irrational, nonsensical”
beliefs and behaviors to lead the mind to subjective experiences that are
positive in every sense.The beliefs
and behaviors are then sacred because questioning them too thoroughly may lead
to their destruction, when may then lead to the loss of really valuable
experiences.This is a deep connection
between religious beliefs and religious experiences, which Boyer misses
entirely.

Religious
Love and Romantic Love

A
half-appropriate analogy for this phenomenon, outside the domain of religion,
is romantic love.The person who is in
love believes, subjectively, that their paramour is the most wonderful and
exciting person in the world.They
feel it’s impossible for them to be happy for very long without their lover
around.This irrational set of beliefs
associated with romantic love can lead to a lot of trouble, as we all know –
but it also leads to wonderful feelings, which seem not to be fully accessible
to the average human psyche in its absence.In a sense, the irrational beliefs that one holds about their lover
during the “madly in love” phase of a romantic relationship, are a sacrament.One does not want to question them very much, because to question
them too deeply might destroy the magic.One becomes annoyed if someone tries to force one to look at one’s love
from a more objective perspective – i.e. from the perspective one would oneself take if one were not in love
with the person.

The
experience of being in an intense romantic love relationship includes a
wonderful feeling of oneness, of so much intense emotional give-and-take
between two people that in a sense there is one combined emotional system
instead of two separate emotional systems.Of course there are other social contexts in which vaguely similar sorts
of emotional-system-fusion exist, as well: a small child and their doting parent;
a team climbing Everest together, or closely collaborating on a tough software
project with a tight deadline.But the
point here is that it is, empirically speaking, hard for the human mind to get
into this intense, desirable state of substantial emotional fusion without the
irrational beliefs that are attached with romantic love.The beliefs and the state of consciousness
feed off each other.One has to believe
one’s lover is really great to feel comfortable fusing with them
emotionally.But once one has fused
emotionally for a while, one is getting a truly great feeling out of one’s
lover, and this naturally increases one’s impression of how awesome they
are.Of course, these same dynamics can
turn negative.Emotional fusion can
also lead to terribly bad feelings, and these bad feelings can then cause one
to drastically decrease one’s impression of one’s lover, a dynamic that plays a
role in “love/hate” romantic relationships.

An
interesting thing about romantic love is that in most cases the lover realizes
that their beliefs about their lover are irrational, but in a sense they still
maintain these beliefs strongly.Knowing that your girlfriend is really just a fairly ordinary girl, you
can still believe she’s the most amazing, wonderful creature in existence.Knowing that by one’s own usual standards
your girlfriend is average-looking, nevertheless,
you can look at her and find her ten times more beautiful than any other
female.And, when one is dumped by a
romantic partner, the pain often exceeds all practical sense.Knowing that in practical fact it won’t
take too long to find another roughly equally satisfying relationship, one
still reacts as if a terribly traumatic event has occurred.

Now,
if we humans had better control over our own thoughts and feelings, we could
approach romantic love quite differently.We could simply induce ourselves to have romantic love feelings for
whomever we rationally decided it would make the most sense to feel that way
towards.And when our lover dumped us,
we could simply turn our romantic feelings toward them off.Lovelife would be come a lot simpler, albeit
also far less interesting.

But
there is one big difference between religious beliefs and rituals and the
irrational beliefs one holds about a lover.In both cases, there are patently silly and irrational beliefs that are
closely connected with certain subjective experience, which are sometimes very
intense and sometimes very pleasurable.But in the romantic love case there is a lot more realization that the
beliefs in question really are silly and subjective.If asked, nearly anyone in love will admit that, in fact, their
lover isn’t all that beautiful or clever even though they seem so
subjectively.On the other hand, very
few religious people will say “Yeah, I know that there probably is no entity
called God that listens to my prayers in any sense closely approximating the
sense in which a human ‘listens’ to something said to them – but holding this
belief is really rewarding so I’ll continue to hold it!”

I
think this difference is largely due to the fact that romantic love, in the
human psyche, tends to fade over time.This fading over time has been shown to have physiochemical roots, and
it’s something that everyone has gotten used to by their mid-20’s or so, in
modern Western culture.It’s famously
true, in our culture, that many teenagers don’t understand the subjectivity and
irrationality of their feelings for their lovers, or “crushes.”But in time, after a few romantic ups and
downs, we get better sense of the way love works, and the way romantic feelings
rise and fade.

On
the other hand, spiritual experience does not have the same
physiologically-based brief time span that romantic love does.Quite the contrary: spiritual experience
has the property that, generally speaking, it intensifies over time.So the beliefs and ritualistic habits
attached to spiritual experience do not become weaker over time, rather they
become stronger, as they are associated with powerfully positive experiences,
and the mind tends to reinforce successful associations.

How
Might One Really Explain Religion?

What
kind of information would be in a book that really lived up to Boyer’s
title…?A real explanation of religion
would not be a dismissive reduction of subjective religious experience in
evolutionary, neuroscience or cognitive science terms.Rather, it would be a careful correlation
between the experiential and empirical aspects of religious reality.It would ask and answer questions such as:

·Which
combinations of beliefs and ritualistic behaviors tend to lead to which kinds
of subjective experiences, especially spiritual experiences?

·What
can one say about the mutual reinforcement dynamic by which positive
experiences reinforce the beliefs/behaviors that were associated with them?Does this dynamic have different properties
or parameters in different contexts?

Another
natural question is whether there are religious traditions that have the
spiritual-experience aspect but not the belief-system/ritualistic-behavior
aspect.The interesting answer is that
there are some religious traditions that claim to be only about spiritual
experience, with no care for beliefs or rituals of any kind.Zen Buddhism and Sufism are two examples.However, in all cases, the practice of these
religions still seems to involve plenty of odd beliefs and ritualistic
behaviors.Zen Buddhists who accept
that rituals are meaningless and only the experience of enlightenment is
important, will nonetheless keep little stone Buddha statues around, or wear
necklaces with precisely 108 beads on them as prescribed by Buddhist
tradition?Would wearing a 107-bead
necklace really slow down one’s progress toward enlightenment?Of course not.But the point is that the sacramental act of wearing a necklace
that is associated with one’s religion, which is associated with Enlightenment,
makes one feel that Enlightenment is always present with one, is a key part of
one’s life.And this feeling may make
one more likely to proceed smoothly along the spiritual path.Ironically, in traditions like this, rituals
and beliefs are used explicitly to help move the mind to a position where it
can do completely without rituals and beliefs.

Boyer
does a good job explaining the particular beliefs and rituals associated with
the world’s religions, in terms of human cognitive mechanisms.But he does not explain why we have evolved
to have religion, not really.He
explains why the various aspects of religious belief and behavior make some
sense evolutionarily, but that’s it.What he’s missing is the immense positive value that religious
experience obviously has for the human psyche.The advent of the rational mind has brought us out of touch with the
world and with each other – it has brought us objectivity, and with
objectivity, has come a feeling of separateness, distinctness, alienation (This
point has been made in countless ways by countless commentators – see e.g. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
or David Bohm, Thought as a System for interesting perspectives.) Religious experience, among other things, is
a way of partially overcoming this separated feeling, of feeling one with other
beings and with the world as a whole, in a simple and yet sometimes
overwhelmingly powerful way.

The
power of religion is not explained by considering its belief-systems and
rituals separately from its experiences.On the other hand, the nature of religious experience itself does not
explain why there should be so many different religions, and so much subtlety
and complexity to religious ritual.The
essence of the “religion” phenomenon lies in the way the experiential, ritual,
and belief-based aspects of religion bind together.